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April 4, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:21:02
Delingpod 66: Elizabeth Hogg
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me and James Delling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but this week's special guest really is wonderful.
She is a kinswoman of mine.
We share an ancestor, don't we?
Cotterell.
We're both Cotterells.
Yes, that's right.
Her name is Liz Hogg.
She's an old, old friend of mine.
Well, you are old, aren't you?
You're 90.
Yes, I'm 90.
That was my 90th birthday.
I loved your 90th birthday.
So did I. And one of the reasons you're my favourite 90-year-old is because you don't at all sound like a 90-year-old.
You sound more like a 60-year-old or somebody my age.
You're completely there.
I spent a lot of my life reading to younger children, my siblings, and I did two stints as a storyteller in different schools.
And so I have had a lot of practice reading out loud.
It's fading a bit now, obviously.
Yeah.
It's going so I forget words that I used not to.
It used to come out bang, you know.
Can you remember the word for that?
What?
Forgetting words.
Yes, I can.
Not at the moment.
I said it's aphasia.
Yeah, of course it is.
Yeah.
But yes, your reading, your story tapes...
Which we have now got, I think, the complete set of.
Have you?
Yeah.
Jim, my eldest, used to go to sleep every night listening to your incredible tapes.
Yes.
And you did Norse myths.
You did...
Greek myths.
Greek myths.
The King Arthur stories.
The Robin Hood ballads.
I didn't do the sort of Disneyfication of Robin Hood.
Right.
But I So that it made a whole.
And it's good stuff, you know.
It's not just good stuff, it's stuff actually.
If those cassettes are transferable onto digital, I think that they ought to have an afterlife.
Well, I always hoped they would, but I advertised them in a local thing.
Nobody bit.
Nobody bit at all.
And I thought, what a shame, because I know that the children who heard these things when I was just telling the stories in school, I was telling the story of Pandora's box, and I was acting it up a bit, you know, obviously, you know, that sort of thing, and she kept eyeing that box, you know.
And then she said, no, no, no, I mustn't.
Epimetheus wouldn't like that at all.
But in the end, it was too much for her.
And then there was a cry.
I had taped this episode anyway, of the children.
And there was a cry from this boy saying, no, don't do it, stupid girl!
And I've got that joke still somewhere, you know, with the live performance.
We've got this running joke in the family.
Whenever we watch TV programmes or films now, whenever they're dramas, And it all goes back to Chekhov's gun.
When you see the gun, you know it's going to be used later on.
In the same way, you're just describing Chekhov's Pandora's box.
She can't open it, so what's she going to do?
Isn't that, in a way, the essence of all stories?
Well, both my parents were good readers out loud anyway, and they both read a lot to us.
I was the one who leapt it up most because I was the oldest and I didn't have any siblings until I was four and a half.
Right.
And then they all came in a bang because it was a Catholic family.
And so they didn't, I don't think they took to it.
As much as I did, but I read every bloody thing I could find that I thought they might like.
All the E. Nesbitt marvellous stories, you know.
Wasn't E. Nesbitt, she was either a Fabian or a colonist?
Yeah, she was.
She was a Fabian.
It was a bonkers set-up, her household.
She worshipped Wells, in fact, who I'm just dealing with now because I'm doing a crossword about his stuff.
And she used a lot of his things like the time machine.
The books like The Time Machine.
And she used bits of them and applied them to children's stories.
She was also fascinated.
She was fascinated by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, you know.
Right.
And so there's one book, The Enchanted Castle, which has...
I think it's the Enchanted Castle, which has the children inside the dinosaurs, because that's what they can do, you know, because it's a magic place.
They come to life after dark.
So there were all sorts of things.
She did wonderful history things for children too.
She did a great deal about Tudors and Stuarts, of course, because they were always the most popular.
And she had modern children In a setting, a Stuart setting, or knowing what they know, and trying to use their boxed brownies on things.
That's great.
Yeah.
Just goes to show, you can be a Fabian and still not be completely awful.
Oh, yes.
No, she certainly wasn't.
She was awful about quite a lot of things.
Yeah.
And she had a ghastly husband.
And she lived...
They lived...
It was a menage a trois, I think, for quite a while.
Oh, right.
But I just loved what she did for the kids, you know, really.
It was just fantastic.
So you had...
When you were growing up...
Yeah.
Were girls treated...
Were girls expected to have the same education as boys?
Or were they considered a kind of inferior species?
Well, my family...
And so I just had my schooling was just three years in a convent and you can imagine what that was like because the nuns were really Victorian women and so it was crap.
So we're talking from what age to what age?
13 to 16.
And that was your education?
And that was my education.
I was behind with everything.
I was made to...
I was holding back the class with all the mathematical subjects because the other girls had had it for three years beforehand.
And the same with Latin.
I was handed...
I'd had...
French governesses when I was very little.
And my French wasn't too bad, I mean, for that age and time.
But I was given a book.
I was made to sit at the back of the class with it, you know.
And I thought, oh, well, this is all right.
It says Roma in Italia Est.
I think I know what that means.
I can manage that.
And then, of course, came all the declensions and things.
It was an hideous shock.
And...
But I've always liked languages anyway and I've met it about with dialects and all sorts, you know.
And I'm always fascinated by word loans, you know, when one language has a word that it drops into another language, which has nothing to do with it at all.
For instance, I heard a lovely one the other day.
My son Oli's girlfriend is Hungarian, and that is not Indo-European.
It's Finno-Ugrin.
And anyway, he asked her, I mean, she's a bright girl, and he asked her, you know, are there any loan words from a Hungarian that have landed into English?
I bet there aren't.
And she said, oh yes, there are.
There's coach.
And he said, what?
And apparently the Hungarians invented the Koch and Thor.
And it was named after a town in Hungary, a small town in Hungary, called Koch.
Well, I didn't know that.
I didn't know that either.
Oh, coach!
Yes, I mean, Ollie loves that, because working in a music shop, as he does, of course he gets all sorts of nationalities, you know, and he always absolutely, you know, tells the people to bits, you know, now tell me what is bread and what is a tree and what is, you know, in your language and that kind of thing.
He loves it, like me.
So, um...
Your lack of education, I think, would astound people today, because people automatically assume that people have always been forced to go to school, or certainly people within our lifetime have.
But you obviously weren't.
No.
Well, you know what sort of a family I came from.
What did your father do?
Well, he was in the Brigade of Guards, and he was...
He was what the Irish call a stoker, which is a gentleman with no money and no land.
And so my snobbish grandmother stuffed him into the Coldstream Guards.
He had not had much of a schooling anyway.
He'd been to the...
What's it called now?
The...
The Catholic school in Birmingham.
I can't remember what it was called.
Right.
Because it had to be for him, you see.
And he was a baronet because his father died when he was 14.
And my mother's family were the same.
We were stiff with baronets, you see, all over.
And none of them thought that education needed to happen at all, particularly for girls.
Nothing at all.
They just threw bread pellets at each other.
These are your brothers?
No, my brothers went to Downside, which was a Catholic school, but the others all went to Eton, which was absolutely fine, but all the cocktails that was went to Eton.
And I lost the last Cottrell cousin only last year, Tom, who was sweet.
I love Tom.
He played the guitar very nicely.
But...
The parents didn't think that education as such was of any value whatsoever.
It was what you were like and how much money you had and how much land and all that kind of thing.
And that was about bloody it.
Right.
So you educated yourself, basically.
Yes, because I had such an odd time really, because when I left the convent, my mother Well, she got the brochure for Gloucester Polytechnic and said, well, I don't think this is quite you, really, oxyacetylene welding, you know, but so what do you want to do?
And I thought, well, I like music and I'm musicale.
But she had no vision of after school, you know, That's it, you know, because that's the law.
And I rather wish that I had tried a bit harder and gone to, I don't know, do a music degree or something.
And I had this friend, Catherine Freeman.
Did you ever hear of John Freeman, who used to do...
What, face to face?
Yes.
Yes, where she married him.
Right.
And went to India, you know, with...
She got a bit grand because I went to see her later on and she was a bit apt to spread herself on the sofa and say, would you mind going upstairs and see if I left my specs on my dressing table?
thinking, who the fuck do you think of what's going on to?
But she had been a good school friend, and we'd written an unbelievably sentimental, appalling sentimental book when we were at school together, instead of me really trying to get some, what was it in those instead of me really trying to get some, what was it What was it in those days?
It was...
I can't even remember what it was called.
What the exams were?
Yes.
School cert?
Yes, school cert.
I just passed school cert.
Right.
Failed geography.
But I was always all right with Lit.
We had a good teacher and who...
Yeah, she was good actually.
I wanted to know more than I was being taught by her because I remember she was telling us about the early Saxon letters, you know.
Yeah, the thorn.
The thorn, win and death, you see.
And so I had to write something about that, well, we all did, all five of us.
It was a tiny school.
And so I made up a story about win and death.
We were frightfully jealous of each other because they both fancied Mr Thorne, you see, like that.
Well, she laughed like hell, but it didn't go any further than that.
Much later it did.
Much later I got to look at all those sort of things, you know.
I like very old stuff.
I would like to have read Beowulf properly.
What?
Yes, what?
Yes, exactly.
So you've read The Seafarer and The Dream of the Rude and The Battle of Malden.
Yes, and that wonderful poem where...
Where the writer has come upon, I think, probably Bath, and he's found these tremendous stone buildings by the Romans, you know, and is absolutely knocked out by, you know, these are giant people who did this,
you know, because we can't do It's quite short.
What's it called?
I can't remember what it's called.
But you read these in the original?
In the untranslated?
Like we used to get in the church, you know, Latin on one side and English on the other, you know.
Yeah.
But you see, Lizzie, you probably have a grasp of literature which will be unheard of now in most...
Yes.
Very, very rare.
This is what makes me so angry.
Yeah, it does.
What's gone wrong?
Well, I think it's because...
The teaching is being taught on tramlines.
I mean, forza, only connect, really.
You must connect, if you find a bit of something which is half a fact, and then it reminds you of something, so you should link the two together and see why it reminds you.
Yeah.
And I haven't got the mental equipment to name this sort of thing properly.
At least I would have had, but I think it's gone now.
And I think a lot of things have disappeared.
The vocabulary is still there, but it needs a big fishing spool.
Yes, but the point is that you had that vocabulary.
You've had it for most of your life.
Yes.
Now, I think that's partly a reflection of who you are and your make-up.
And the extraordinary things that...
I did.
You see, where my contemporaries, they were all richer than us anyway, and so they were Debs and things like that, you see.
And my rich cousins I envied frightfully.
They had lovely pretty frocks and things.
My mother was not interested in clothes for the girls at all.
She She made models of all sorts of things, like aeroplanes.
If you went into her bedroom, you could get a Fockevoort stuck in your hair because she'd stuck them all up in the ceiling.
Anyway, she was something else.
So she was quite sort of boyish?
Yeah, completely.
Completely.
So now she'd probably have considered herself transgender and gone...
No, she wouldn't have.
No, no, she was absolutely men and men and women and women.
But she was much cleverer than...
She was uneducated too, like me, but she was interested in things and she was much cleverer than my dad was, who just had his military stuff.
Right.
And poor thing, he went all the way through the North African business, you see.
We didn't see him for six years.
This was in the Second World War?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, he wasn't that old.
They married...
My parents married when they were 22, which was young then.
And my mother's aunt was Was the Duchess of Northumberland.
Right.
I'm sorry to say, but anyway...
Yeah, you are chock-a-block with toffs in your family, basically.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Loads of them.
And anyway, Aunt Hedy, as she was called, said that when they were married, they were going to Mallorca or somewhere for their honeymoon, and they could spend the first night at Sion, you know, which is the house that Right.
So instead of doing what people usually do on the first night of their honeymoon, they spent most of the night tobogganing downstairs on a silver tea tray they'd been given as a wedding present.
You know, I mean, it's not normal.
No, no, no, no.
I see that.
You mentioned earlier that your parents' generation treated one another bloodily.
Yes, they did.
I think my...
Because the other duke was the Duke of Richmond, who was my mother's grandfather.
Right.
Her mother...
I've got a picture of her out there, which everybody says is so pretty, but...
She wasn't a nice lady at all.
She had three daughters before she had a much-wanted son.
And if they were going to a party, she lined them up in front of her and she never told them that they looked nice or pretty or anything like that.
She just said, yes, that'll do.
And that was it.
And one of her great dicta was...
When she saw my mother was holding a hanky, she said, when you go to a party, you do not blow your nose.
You either pick or sniff.
You know?
I mean, I had a great aunt, Aunt Miami, who broke her leg farting.
She...
No.
Yes.
She was, God, what was her son?
That was an enormous family, they'd call her on herxes.
And anyway, they were all staying at Sion, I think, yes.
And she, my mother always said about Miami, she said...
Yes, she always added on to her name as the funniest woman on earth.
So she said, well, I'll tell you about Aunt Mimey, the funniest woman on earth.
You know, this always was added to the thing in brackets.
And Aunt Mimey thought it would amuse the dinner party or the post-dinner party that, I think it was Sion.
If she left the room and she stood on one leg and farted, you see, but what happened was that the floors were frankly slippery.
So the leg that was there slid and she broke her bloody leg.
So you see, there's a lot of funny stuff.
No, I do get the impression that particularly the upper classes were weird, slightly barbaric.
Yes, very much so.
And yet my cultural grandfather, Sir John, he cursed me a bill and he cursed me, don't know.
But he liked to read, and he'd certainly got some Shakespeare inside him, because his three daughters, when they were all arguing, made a hell of a noise, like a chicken house, you know.
And he would walk into the middle of them and say, her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in women, which is King Lear, of course.
Right.
So he had his reading bit anyway.
But you gave him a Yokel accent, a Herefordshire accent then?
No, I gave, no, that was who he was castigating.
Oh, I see, I'm sorry, right.
Because I know there was a thing, wasn't there, a time when the rural gentry did not necessarily have RP accents, but spoke in the country.
Oh, yes.
That would have been...
Earlier.
Earlier.
Yes, it would.
I tell you where you get a very good example of that is in the film Tom Jones.
You know, you saw it, you must have done, I think.
Yes.
And there's the...
What's his name?
Squire Weston.
Right.
Squire Weston, Sophia's father, is being very cross with young Tom Jones, Albert Finney, I think.
Yeah.
You don't behave like that when it comes to nice porch houses.
Right, yes.
And also in Vanity Fair, that family, they're not posh by any stretch.
I think the actual poch thing, which ended up with the J. Arthur Rank accent, you know, thanks for the hit, you know, that sort of thing happened much later.
It was very refrained and genteel.
There was a woman who was in our village, and she was...
She had an open dog, which was always what a filthy arse.
And...
And she would turn on him.
It was called Jerry.
And she would say, Jerry, got your little boy.
And that was the genteel accent of most governesses who were still around.
Because I had some French governesses and some English ones before I actually went to school.
Where I learnt a lot was when I... So I wasn't good enough to go to university.
And so I, by sheer, I don't know, accident really, a friend of my mother's knew somebody, and I got into GCHQ. And not smartly like Rosemary.
Yes, that's my mother-in-law.
Yes, exactly.
Who was at Hot H, I think, at Bletchley?
Yes, well, so was I. But I was right at bottom.
I knew a lot of people she did.
Did you?
So you were at Bletchley?
No, I wasn't at Bletchley because I was too young.
I was younger than Rosemary.
And I was at Eastcote, which is where it went to before it went to Gloucestershire.
Okay, so what did you do at GCHQ? Well, I did a bit of code-breaking, a little bit, you know.
Were you any good at it?
I'll bet you were.
I wasn't bad, because I'm quite good at crosswords and things like that, but nothing really, nothing with maths involved.
No, but tell me how it worked.
So you were how old at this stage?
17 when I joined it and I was paid 45 shillings a week.
£2.15 a week.
Was that rubbish or was that quite good?
It was rock bottom.
Was it?
I was temporary clerk, grade two.
But did you have to be interviewed for this job and stuff?
Yes, but it was very loose.
They just asked me if I could remember this string of numbers.
I said, well, I suppose so, you know.
7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 22 or something.
Yeah, well, that'll do, you know.
And I didn't know what it was for or what I was doing at all.
And there were...
I did once break a code, and I was frightfully pleased, and all the chaps were very pleased with me for doing so, but that was the only once.
No, it would have been either...
The Persian or the Japanese, I think, stuff.
But you didn't speak Persian or Japanese?
I was made to learn some Persian and all I can remember of that now is which means this tea is cold and has a bad smell.
This is extraordinary, I didn't know this.
So you were made to learn a bit of Persian and Japanese so you could break players?
I had a choice between Iran and Hebrew.
And I looked at the alphabets, or whatever they called them, and I thought that the Iranian, which is the Arabic script, was much prettier than the Hebrew one, so I picked that.
So you get up in the morning, presumably bright and early.
Were you in uniform?
No, no, no, no.
This was post-war.
And it was a bunch of Nissan huts out near Upsbridge, which is out there.
Mrs Jarrett was my landlady and Mrs Jarrett gave me breakfast and supper but I had to forego lunch because my salary, my wage, only ran to toothpaste and sanitary towels and no more.
so I used to watch the trolley going round with buns on it and most of the girls who were doing this were girls who lived locally so I was the worst off really Right.
And my mother had no idea.
She thought, oh, well, you know, she'll be a diplomat any minute, you know.
Yes.
And she was quite clueless about it.
I did complain eventually after about 18 months.
I said it would be nice to be able to have lunch sometimes.
And she then, she had no idea about money or anything like that or what money was worth.
Yeah.
And what I could have been paid, maybe.
And she...
So she gave me...
Because there were 52 weeks in the year, she gave me 52 pounds.
And I got it 26 and 26, half a year.
Right.
And then I was able to have a bun, you know, or something.
Right, imagine a pound a week.
Yes, it was.
That's probably quite a lot now.
It was.
Yes, it was then.
I mean, I... Which is nice.
He took me to some of the very earliest Chinese places.
Oh, right.
So I learned to live with chopsticks.
Yes, next to the British Museum, that was.
So, okay, so you were sort of a spy, well, at least a codebreaker.
Yes.
And, well, like doing crossword puzzles, but for the country.
Yes, but you didn't know what you were doing.
You didn't know what this was leading to at all.
You had no idea.
You just had the thing that had to be checked all over and you had to look for repeats of groups of numbers and things like that.
And I'm sure that's much what Rosemary was doing at the same time.
And then you reported back if you found that there were some significant things amongst these things that you reported to your boss.
And it went no further than that for you.
Yes.
So how long did you do that for?
Three years.
Right.
And I met a lot of interesting chaps who were tied up with lots of other things, like the School of, what is it, Oriental and African Studies and so on, and they were very jolly.
I liked them.
So us people.
Yes.
Yes, yes.
Those sort of people, because they were necessary, because they knew different languages and they'd been all over the place.
They were older than me, and they had been to other places during the war on Christmas Island and places like that where these sort of receiving places were.
But I got fed up with it after three years because I thought I haven't had any fun and I'm now 21.
I'm getting old.
I'm getting old and I would have liked a 21st birthday party or something.
So my father gave me an old watch of his and my mother amazingly bought me a fur coat from Augustus...
God, what was it called, that shop?
The furriers of the West, they called themselves.
They were in Hereford.
And so I had a fur coat.
So I went back to the GCHQ place.
And of course, these were all tremendous lefties, all these people you see.
And they thought this was an absolutely dreadful thing to have been given a fur coat.
Well, even then, people were funny about fur, were they?
No, no.
Just some snob thing.
Oh, I see.
Did they not recognise that you were...?
I don't know.
They must have done because I spoke better than they did.
I mean, I had more RP accents.
But I did meet all sorts of different kinds of people with all sorts of different accents.
And there was one...
You know that Evelyn Wall book where the chap ends up horrifically in the African jungle reading David Copperfield?
Yes.
Yes, well, I had a stint like that because my landlady said one day, you know, that she was going to stay where her hubby used to be, you know, and that was in...
I was in one of the southern suburbs somewhere and what was I going to do?
So I said in the office that I was going to be stranded without anywhere to stay and a splendid woman Who wore a turban all the time and always had a cigarette stuck to her bottom lip.
And she said, oh, you can come and stay with me and Mum.
And so I'd stayed that bit with her and Mum, and Mum wanted to be read to.
And so I did that, you know, in I've written all these things.
I've written all these episodes up, you know.
So I did meet a lot of very different people.
Right.
And I think Mum, Mum was the most gentle of creatures, but I think she was illiterate probably.
Right.
But Doris, that's right, was her daughter.
Of course.
Of course, yes.
Doris.
Doris was wonderful and she cooked endless mince.
And so you did your three years and then what did you do with the rest of your life?
Well then, this was rather dreadful.
I had a different boyfriend who was working near where I don't know where my father was at that time.
And he said, well, you could go and work for my sister.
And he had a sister who worked at Kenilworth and had four children, four babies, and so I could go there and change their nappies and do that kind of thing, so I did a bit of that.
Not for very long, and I didn't enjoy it very much.
And that's right, she was married to a doctor.
And I was a bit worried because I hadn't got anything very permanent, and my mother expected me to go...
Not to be dependent on her, you know.
She was terrified of getting into debt.
Right.
She wasn't rich, but she could probably have kept me for a year without, I should think, anyway.
And I had four younger brothers and sisters.
And so then...
Then I thought, you know, well, I'll have to somehow go to London proper and get something in London proper.
And a friend, one of the Debbie friends of ours was extremely wet.
She'd got herself a pad I don't know where you would expect to go in those days.
But she didn't want to leave mummy.
And so she said I could have her pad there.
So what it was, was that I worked for a woman who, she ran an agency, a secretarial agency.
I had in the meantime, yes, I had learned shorthand and typing with Mr.
Onions in Ross on Y. And, Emily, Emily, stop making that noise.
I've got students here.
Anyway, but I did quite enjoy that.
I thought that was interesting.
I didn't get very good at it or very fast or anything, but I could cope.
And so, anyway, Norma Skemp, who ran this agency, I was married to a parliamentary draftsman and was a very nice woman indeed.
They both were.
And they lived off Queensgate.
And so I had a room with them.
And as fast as I got fired from a job, she found me another one because I was paying her rent, you know.
And so I had various things.
I worked for a divorce detective for a bit.
And what I was mostly doing was writing condolence letters to the detectives' wives, widows, because these were old policemen.
They were hanging about in those days, seeing whose shoes had been left outside which hotel room door, and all that business.
And quite often they were hanging about in the street too.
So they all got colds and died.
And I had to write these condolence letters to their wives.
And there was more of that that I was doing than anything else at all.
Which was just as well, because if anything financial came into it, I am enumerate.
Were you having any fun in those days as well?
No, not really, because I didn't have any money.
I mean, one was paid extremely well.
And I was so jealous of all my contemporaries of age and class too, you see.
Because they were all having a better time than me and they were going to parties and things.
And all the latest musicals were coming out like Annie Gets Your Gun and things.
And I couldn't go to any of those for a long time.
And I wasn't particularly pretty.
So I didn't have loads and loads of chaps knocking at my door and wanting to take me out.
So, I remember the coronation, in coronation year, where it pissed with rain.
My father was marching in that, and he got me and one of his ex-girlfriends a seat right opposite Buckingham Palace.
So we sat there, and there were all these white Russians cheering away like mad, and so on.
And then I went home to my digs, and everybody else was at a party, but not me, and I just sat in my room.
Oh, how sad.
It was awful.
It really was ghastly.
And it was simply because I think my parents had no idea what...
What went on, you know, with the next generation, you know.
I mean, my mother had a wonderful time because she was at Gordon Castle with all those Gordon Lennoxes and at Scion with the purses and everything.
And her old grandpa, the Duke, thought she was fun because she sang to him.
She had had a stint in Paris.
She had a huge voice, an enormous voice.
And unlike me, who was weedy, I could speak but not sing that loud.
And I didn't know enough music anyway then.
So I didn't really learn about music until after I was married.
And I thought that would be nice to go to the City Literary Institute and pick it up there.
Probably your kind of straightened existence was probably more characteristic of the period than your upper-class contemporaries, wasn't it?
I mean, people probably could afford less and could have less fun than they do now.
Oh, yes.
I mean, there was always a thing.
You could take a girl out for a fiver or something, you know, and still have change left at the end of it.
Yes, certainly.
But I didn't have...
I don't think I ever earned more than a fiver a week in all that period.
And when I met Michael, I don't think I was earning much more then.
I was working then for King's College London University for the...
That was a joke.
That was for the theoretical physicists, of which I knew nothing whatsoever.
Nothing at all.
They were very disappointed in me.
And the pharmacologists, who were very nice, I got on well with them and I had a typewriter next to a sink full of leeches, you know,
and they had these drums with blackened Frog muscle, which was, the drum went round and round and the twitch was seeing, what's that South American arrow poison?
Oh yes, curare.
Yes, curare.
They were trying that out on bits of frog muscle.
So that was interesting.
And then one day, the head laboratory assistant, who's a lovely man, when he heard that I got engaged to Michael and was going to leave, he said, well, I'll take you out to lunch.
So I said, oh, thank you, Jeff.
So he took me to one of those...
It's where they had palm trees in the strand, on there somewhere.
And he looked around when we sat down at the table, he looked around and he said, I shouldn't have brought you in here, it's very middle class.
But he was a sweetie, I liked him.
So I worked there, and then afterwards I worked for a bit...
In the rising television thing.
I've heard of the television, yes.
Well, it was something that doesn't exist now.
What was it called?
ATV. My job there was to sit in the dark in a room with all the stuff that had come in,
which was old, I can't remember the number of the films, but these films, a great string of them Oh, I see.
And I got a bit bored with that because they were so bad, these things, and I had to write my crit of all of them.
Well, you can imagine what sort of things I wrote.
Anyway, so I left that.
And then what did I do after that?
I don't know, there were dozens of things.
Oh, I had to work for Knight Frank and Rutley for a bit, and that was very boring, I thought, house selling.
What else was there?
I mean, I wasn't any good.
I worked for a travel agent, and that was frightfully smart, and I didn't really fit that, because I had Debbie Girls had, you know.
And I mean, when I was at GCHQ and my shoes ran out, I used to go to work in gumboots.
Right.
Nobody minded there because they were all, you know, you can imagine.
Yes.
And they were all sort of like Alan Watsit, you know.
Yes, Alan Turing.
Alan Turing.
Yes, but I imagine that Night Frank and Rutley, you couldn't turn up in your gumboots.
No, no, you couldn't.
No.
You couldn't, not in proper London.
But presumably, how old were you when you got married?
27, I think.
Right.
And you married a baronet?
Yes.
Well, he wasn't then.
He wasn't then?
No, he wasn't then.
But we knew he would be one day.
Right.
And so Piers is now.
Ah, okay.
And it's very funny because Piers is quite lefty.
Yeah.
And his wife is even more lefty.
And she won't call herself Lady Hogg.
And so I'm Elizabeth Lady Hogg because I'm the Dowager.
Oh, is that how it works?
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Isn't it funny?
Well, nobody knows that.
Oh, I'll show you a funny thing.
Yeah.
Mrs.
Elizabeth Hogg.
It's community nursing records.
Mrs.
Elizabeth Hogg likes to be known as Lady Hogg.
Yes.
Is that true?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, they wrote that.
Well, yes.
But how did they...
They must have got it off something else, probably.
I don't know.
I probably had an envelope lying about with that on it, you see.
Right.
Oh, what, did they infer that you liked to know Lady Hogg?
Yes, yes, yes.
You hadn't said to them, call me Lady Hogg.
No, no.
Well, it's not worth it, you know.
I say Mrs.
pretty well for everything, because...
Either they're frightfully interested in saying, oh, how did that happen?
And they go, oh, are you in relation to Kuenjin?
You know, no, but my husband was.
Or...
Or they've never heard of it and think that Lady is my first name.
Right, yeah, yes.
I've had a lot of things saying Mrs Lady Hogg.
Right, yes, yes, yes.
They just don't know.
Yeah.
Why would they, you know?
No, well, exactly.
Yeah.
Yes.
So...
Yes, you married Michael, and he's a journalist.
Yes.
Now, no longer with us, but that's how you know my father-in-law, through Michael, through journalism.
Your father-in-law?
Yes, Stephen.
Oh, Stephen.
Yes, yes.
Yes, of course.
This is Michael's friend.
Yes, exactly.
And after, first of all, Michael died of booze, and then Rosemary died not of booze.
Yeah.
And so your father-in-law and I said, well, we've always got on right well, frankly well, and we've got a lot of interest Well, it must be so horrible.
Here you are.
You've got the mind of a 40-year-old, let's say, but you're stuck in the body of a 90-year-old with things sort of breaking and things.
The same with Stephen, who's now in a care home.
And it must be horrible.
You're thinking, well...
Yes, I do think that.
Wasn't it Betty Davis who said that old age is not for sissies?
I'm sure she's right.
I see it coming.
I observe your generation because I think, well, this is going to be where I am someday with luck.
Yes.
So long as you know that that's going to happen.
I think with some people it comes as a terrible surprise and shock.
Right.
But I think if you think this is going to happen to me eventually, you know, or something is going to happen.
Yeah.
I've been knocked over by a steamroller or something.
Yeah, there was another old friend of mine, Kathleen Payton, who wrote the Flambards series.
Yes, hold on a minute, I've got to get a hanky.
When she heard that I'd given up hunting because of my horrible accident, she wrote to me, aged 90 or something, saying, I really think you should carry on hunting, you know, you should...
You should do what you enjoy.
And actually, I'm just reading Churchill's biography and he was of a similar view that actually dying while galloping on a horse was actually about the best way to go.
But I was wondering, here we are...
At the beginning of this, of what's probably going to be a hideous black death type coronavirus pandemic, which is going to, death is undoubtedly going to side his way through your generation.
How does it feel from the perspective of a 90-year-old?
Well, it'll stop hurting.
Because at night it's not funny, really.
Because you can't find the way to lie.
Where it doesn't hurt, you know.
And so I get up and sit on the edge of the bed and read, you know.
Yes.
And then it calms down a bit and one can get another hour of sleep or something.
But it's a ball.
I'll show you something.
Yeah.
I'll show you something that's in the front room.
Right.
I'm guilty I'm making a get-up all the time to show me things and it might hurt you.
No, no, it's all right.
I mean, I need to be walking.
Oh, OK, good.
OK, so I'm helping you.
Yeah, yes.
Right.
You have to come with me.
OK, I'm coming with you.
OK. Sorry.
I'm going to take the tape recorder with me.
I still play my fiddle.
You still play the fiddle?
Oh good.
That's good.
I've got two friends who are going deaf.
We're the last of the bunch.
Some of that is just stuff, tapes that I wanted to hear.
Yes.
A lot of these are things that I wrote for kids.
Right.
And I've got Jim's old tape recorder.
Have you?
Yes, Stephen gave it to me.
So this was what you play all your cassettes on obviously?
Yes, well I had no, I mean I used to have a big Phillips thing.
Yeah.
And there's all my Are these the master tapes?
They're masters, yes.
So the ones that Jim has got, what are they?
Well, they were copies.
Copies?
Yes, I was able to copy then.
I was much better at doing that kind of thing then.
But I was looking at these the other day.
Yeah.
Because Tiffany was telling me she was in...
the fourth and so i looked up to see what i'd written about that yeah and i found it was quite a page turner actually no i really think i think there is um there is an afterlife for your liz honestly bible i did all the bible stories
yes because i i was so cross when i uh found that the only things that um the children knew was uh um the christmas story and uh the noah's ark And they didn't know any of the other stories.
They didn't know Job or Daniel and the Lion's Den and all those things like that.
And there were some thumping stories there.
Well, also, for a thousand years or more...
Every educated person would have known these stories.
Exactly.
How do you cope if somebody hands you Milton, for instance?
I'm so cross with the lack of...
the narrowness of the education the children are getting now.
There's a woman up the road, and she...
She works for real thickos.
She's trying to help the absolute cretins to read and things like that.
They're adults, you know, and some children, little black things who've never had anything at all, you know.
And she said that she'd...
She came to me and said...
You used to be a storyteller.
Have you got something that would work for them?
Yes.
Because you've obviously got stuff that's good for children, but can it be adapted, any of it, for grown-ups?
And I thought of something that could, so I gave that to her and read it to her.
And apparently it's had the most tremendous success.
Oh, I'm so pleased.
I'm so, so pleased.
Yeah, because I've got...
Oh, sorry.
That's your violin stand, yeah.
I've got heaps of those.
But you see, there's loads of stuff.
Upstairs I've got all the written stuff.
Right.
These are the music books I did for children.
Little short things, which my...
Sister who can draw, illustrated.
Lovely.
And I wrote just these stupid things about what children get up to.
We climb the hill with our wooden sledge.
Yes, that's right.
These are all songs you wrote?
Yes.
Right.
Children's songs.
Yes, totally simple and very short.
Right.
And just for...
I don't know.
Yes, I'm quite pleased with those.
I know.
Well, this is the sort of thing that it could vanish with you, or it could, if we can somehow preserve it.
There's that, and then there was musical monsters.
Because I was giving piano lessons and the little boys were not at all keen on pieces with titles like Elfin Rebels or things like that.
They wanted something tougher than that, so I thought, well, I'll write musical monsters.
Musical monsters.
Yes, so there we are.
I mean, I'm afraid that's copy decks with a bag.
Yeah.
But you see, my sister can draw beautifully.
That's the hunchback.
So this is your song?
jangling bells are loudly ringing from the ropes a man is hanging somebody is up there swinging and the decibels are clanging Quasimodo tightly clinging he is not afraid of falling down Do come down and stop dong-dinging.
I can't bear this dinner falling.
You see, there's the Transylvanian wolf.
We'll take this from the kitchen, because the poems are quite fun anyway.
Right.
Yes, I'm just going to read the Transylvanian waltz.
I'd rather sit down on a nettle, I'd sooner be stung by a bee, than let the nocturnal Count Dracula sink his incisors in me.
In Transylvania, somewhere around Romania, possibly nearer Albania, that's where the vampires hang out.
I'll open my door to the sunshine, for bats cannot work in the light, and thread me a necklace of garlic cloves for my protection at night.
It's not marvellous poetry, but it describes the character.
Read this one, go on.
Yes.
This is Major and Minor, you see, when he's Edward Hyde.
Oh, I see.
Henry Jekyll is a nice, kind man, helping everybody that he can, but he has a most unusual plan.
That's Mr Jekyll all over.
In his laboratory he drinks his bubbling potions.
I've forgotten the tunes, otherwise I'd sing it.
Changing his personality and also his emotions.
Edward Hyde is in his night-time prowl.
Round the corner you can hear a howl.
All his habits now are rather foul.
That's Mr.
Hyde on.
So that verse was major and that was minor.
Oh, great.
Then, Frankenstein the lightning man has a good idea So he robs a tomb or two when the coast is clear Here an arm and there a head, spare parts surgery Never mind the harmless dead, live again they'll be Not the rivets in the neck, hammer in the bolts.
Soon there'll be a thunderstorm with reviving votes.
Hope the lazy daisy holds and that nothing breaks.
Won't he be a clever lad when the creature wakes?
That's great.
Yeah.
You know what lazy daisy is?
It's a stitch.
I didn't know that.
Oh, oh, oh.
Oh, very clever.
Yes, very well.
And then this wonderful picture Womp did.
Yeah, that's a lovely mummy.
Yes, she's very good.
She's like me, you know, she never got into art school.
That is a beautiful illustration.
Isn't it?
Goodness me, lovely detail.
Yeah.
I could shake my bandaged fists at nosy Egyptologists.
What do you think those robbers did?
They broke into my pyramid, found my tomb and forced the lid.
I shall damn them with a curse, or ten plagues, or something worse.
How would you like your jar canopic made a common college topic?
It could make you misanthropic.
And this is another lovely drawing.
Yes.
It's got my best rhyme in it, this one too.
What is this that spends its evenings baying at the moon?
Is it an escaped Alsatian or a loose baboon?
Warmly clad in hairy face, dripping jaws and fangs, crunching up his victim's bones as we crunched meringues.
Oh, very good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I tried to write a sort of Indian-style tune for this.
There's not a lot of oxygen up here The air is very rarefied and clear And I lumber through the snow Leaving footprints as I go Causing wonder to the mountaineer At times I watch him from a distant peak.
He seems to me to be some kind of freak.
Though I call him every night, he reacts with silly fright and is far too terrified to speak.
And I did this before Lloyd Webber.
Oh yes, yes, the Phantom of the Opera.
I don't suppose a hideous composer should show his ugly face, for so quite improper a sight at the opera would be a major disgrace.
And it goes into A major there.
Oh yes, very clever, yep.
So I'll hide in the sewer where people are fewer, under the orchestra.
Though I'd rather be nearer Hearing it clearer Or in the stalls by far And...
In the dark and eely deep Something mighty lies asleep Something mighty like a sheep Oversize Summer days he loves to float Drifting like an upturned boat Sucking salmon down his throat as they rise.
Scientists and trawling net as dick or sonar.
Submarine and let haven't made their capture yet.
No surprise.
And if anyone hasn't guessed, that's called the Loch Ness Monster.
Oh, a lovely picture of the Loch Ness Monster eating a fish.
Yes.
Really nice.
And that's all the water, you see.
Oh, I see, yes, yes, I see all the dark notes, yeah.
And then this, the biggest monster of all, that's the last one.
Right.
So you have to read that.
Okay, I'll read myself, okay.
I know the most alarming creature, and that I fear is my piano teacher.
If I forget to bring my books, it gives me one of its awful looks.
I have to practice all my scales.
I must remember to cut my nails, yes, and have clean hands.
It claims the right to tell the black keys from the white.
It makes me play the same old phrase for seconds, minutes, hours and days.
And while I play, it groans and hums until my fingers become ten thumbs.
For the correct use of the pedal, I'm sure that I deserve a medal.
Of all the monsters I have ever met, my piano teacher's the worst one yet.
And so, I suppose, you see, you have this book, and you...
You should do your own picture.
That's brilliant.
Liz, you should have gone to university.
You should have been, well, lots of things.
But, I mean, do you have any regrets?
Well, I'm sorry I never got anything off the ground except one children's novel.
And I won a prize with that.
But it was...
Did it do what?
It was published?
Yes, it was.
And it sold?
And it sold, but not enormously.
Right.
What was it called?
Gorgonzola Summer.
Right.
And it's about some children on holiday.
They're a seaside holiday, and they come across in a bathing hut a very small gorgon who got there from ancient Greece, you see.
And so they call her Zola because their father is very fond of gorgonzola cheese, you see.
Handy.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
So there isn't much more than that to it, except they're trying to protect one of their play places, which might be built over.
Developed.
Yes, ah yes.
I thought that was a good thing to be doing, you know.
And anyway, it's quite nice, Gorgonzola Summer.
But I didn't like the editress.
I didn't like what she wanted me to do.
She was very young.
I don't think she knew her greatness.
She did know a bit.
Yes.
And so she also wanted me to have a sort of EastEnders row between two families of children, which I didn't want to do.
Right.
Because it got...
When she said, what about this and what about that, it was getting more and more vulgar.
Yes.
And it didn't need that.
Right.
And it wasn't...
It wasn't the children's fault in the book that their parents didn't realise that the Greeks had a different alphabet when they saw the letter with the postage stamp on it.
They didn't know it was called Hellas.
Ah, right, right.
And so I thought it did all right.
My grandchildren, James and...
And Sarah, they ran round Ealing where they lived, you know, and every time they went to the library they said, my granny's written that book!
So that was very nice of them, I was pleased.
But before we end up, what do you think we've lost in this modern world?
What do you think we're missing from the world you grew up in?
Well, mine was a bit peculiar really because I mean lots of my Lots of my contemporaries didn't know as much stuff as me because they hadn't been left alone to find out things, you know.
It was all given to them on a plate, you know.
So, my younger sisters, they knew more.
I mean, even Mac, Mary Clare, that is.
Mac was the one who...
Second child syndrome.
She dropped out.
She didn't want to be with all you lot, you know.
And her idea of a good time was to go to the police ball in Hereford or the Farman's Ball and things like that.
Oh, she went the common way?
Yes, she did.
But the other one was the exact opposite.
They were chalk and cheese.
The younger one is the howling snob.
Fantastic.
It's so funny.
So I suppose what you're saying is you can't draw general conclusions about when everything was...
No.
I mean, I could see what I could see, you know, what was going on, but I was not part of it.
What do you think we've...
What would you like to get back from the old days?
What has our culture lost?
I think something much more general, really.
I think, as I say, I think that they are taught now in tramlines, you know.
That woman I was telling you about, who I gave a story to, she's got a boss who has got every known English degree and things, but she was complaining that she was hearing but she was complaining that she was hearing too much laughter coming from Dee's class.
Now, if you're trying to get through to children, or just idiotic grown-ups, you'll have them eating out of your hand if you can make them laugh.
Yes.
And this woman thought, no, no, they must know what a past participle is, you know.
And this is absolute bollocks, really.
That comes with time.
I was never taught those things, but you pick them up eventually, somebody mentions it a couple of times, you know, that's what that is, you know.
You don't need to hammer it into people, I don't think.
And how are you looking forward to your four months of compulsory, life-saving isolation from the coronavirus?
Well, I've got lots of music I haven't played yet.
I can still more or less play extremely badly, and the piano a bit too.
And...
I can always write.
I mean, I have a book down there with my deep thoughts in it, and some of my deep thoughts in it, which is, a lot of it is rubbish, but it's, when I think of something, I tend to write it down there.
Is it like a commonplace book?
Yes, yes, really.
Such as people don't have anymore?
No, exactly.
Which is a shame.
Yes, well, I think so.
I think people should do that.
And I keep telling people, you know, I have lots of Lots of people I know who are in their sort of 50s going on 60s and so on like that.
And they're obviously needing something, you know.
And I say, well, why don't you A, B, C or D, you know, try this.
You can bore yourself, of course, and just sit down in front of the telly endlessly, you know.
But...
But I think...
But I think when you've had a go at making something yourself, creating something yourself, you know, it's okay really.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to go and see Stephen now.
Yes.
And I'll send him your love.
Of course.
I'm glad we did this, because I just think you're just an amazing, fascinating person, and it's great to have some of you.
It's by sheer accident, really.
But it's been great.
Christopher Booker, I never got him down on tape, and I really regret it.
I'm glad I've got at least some of you to share with the world, so that you survive...
After your...
Yes, after my demise.
Yeah, after your demise.
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So good.
So on that very cherry note...
Yes, yes.
Thank you, Liz Hogg.
Oh, well, thank you for listening, really.
Good.
There's so much.
I've got all that written stuff upstairs.
The bad novels I wrote.
I wrote one which I think was quite good, but I've never got it published.
I nearly did.
Hamish Hamilton nearly took it.
You got the manuscript?
Yes, yeah, but it's out of date now because all sorts of things are wrong because I wrote it in the 70s.
Why is that wrong?
It's the 70s novel?
Yeah, well, I suppose it is, yes, but it's It's based on my relations attitudes and things, you know, and how they spoke and how little they knew.
I mean, they were country folk, hunting, shooting, fishing, you know, and that sort of thing.
And that was about it, really.
And it really starts off with this This pathetic landowner who only has women in his family and they're adults really.
And he thinks he wants to tidy up the place because he wants to get married to a beautiful lady.
And so he goes up to London and he buys statues of classical gods and dots them around him.
Because women like that kind of thing.
Well, that's what he thinks, yes.
He's called Orion.
and then it goes on into the present day with a Labour politician who is also fed up with being a Labour politician and he buys the house that Orion was Ryan's, you see, and they do it all up and they keep finding things that we've already seen because Orion had them and now they're being discovered again.
They don't know what they're for, you know, there's an extraordinary way of mowing grass, for instance, that was...
I went to...
I sat in with the Encyclopedia Britannica to find out what they were doing with all these things, you know, what they needed.
And I also, because a lot of it is agricultural, I also, I went to, I asked Q. I remembered the story of, I think, the Duke of Devonshire, I think, who grew the enormous greenhouse, you know, and wanted to see if he could grow bananas.
And he grew a banana and spent a fortune on building this with ground glass and everything.
And then eventually it's a ceremony when the first banana is brought to him at the table to eat, you know.
And he's miserably disappointed.
He says he's It tastes just like any other banana, you see?
So I thought, I'll use that, but I'll make it a yam.
And there'll be a mistake because some yams need a special way of cooking because otherwise they're poisonous and they knock you out.
Oh, right.
Knock you out.
So the poor politician dies because he was...
Of ill-prepared yams.
Yes.
But I had lots of bits of the...
Yes, did you know that his head was kept by the Mahdi when he was...
At Khartoum?
Yes, at Khartoum.
But he had already kept one of the Chinese people's head in a suitcase under his own bed.
I didn't know that.
That's karma, isn't it?
Yeah, that is, yeah.
How did the Mahdi preserve his head?
I can't remember now.
It's a long time since I've read the book.
But it's...
There were all sorts of things like that.
And...
It's the Peninsula War, because there's a dreadful man who's a gardener who eats a Frenchman when he's extremely hungry in Spain.
Right.
It doesn't say he does, but it's obvious.
It's obvious.
So it goes through that part of history.
Right.
Yes.
Okay, well, I'd like to see this manuscript.
So maybe this could be my two missions, to try and get there.
Now, I do want to get your tapes onto...
And actually available to people.
I mean, maybe I should put them on my website so that people can listen to them, you know.
Yeah.
They'd be...
I don't know how it would work.
But anyway, right.
I'm going to go and see Stephen now.
Thank you.
Thank you, Liz.
That's been great.
No, no, no, no, no.
I like the way that you ramble on.
It's a good thing.
Thank you.
All right.
And that was Liz Holk, everyone.
Thank you and goodbye.
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